US, China lead list of top defense spenders in 2021 – By Rachel Nostrant (Military Times) / Sept 23, 2022
The United States once again topped the list of military spenders, a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found.
Globally, the amount spent on defense reached an all-time high in 2021, with more than $2.1 trillion spent on the world’s militaries. And while that equates to only a 0.7% increase from expenditures in 2020 — which topped out at $1.98 billion and was the largest total spent since 1988 — it remains a telling number, considering tensions both in Europe and in the Pacific.
“Even amid the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, world military spending hit record levels,” Diego Lopes da Silva, senior researcher with SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program, said in the report. “There was a slowdown in the rate of real-terms growth due to inflation. In nominal terms, however, military spending grew by 6.1%.”
The top five spenders — the U.S., China, India, the United Kingdom and Russia, respectively — accounted for 62% of the world’s total military expenditures last year.
